December 14, 2005

thank you, sir...may i have another?

by

Tere: More often than not, I go to school every time some one like you opens his or her mouth, as was the case when you responded to Joan's article this past summer. Whether ego drives a passionate response or not, does it really matter? Your letter provided the opportunity to delve more deeply into the points raised in the New Yorker piece and an alternative way for framing the work of contemporary choreographers. The frequent invocation of Judson by critics when viewing conceptual work by young dance makers is a case in point as I agree that most of this work is not necessarily a response or recapitulation of an earlier time. Johanna Drucker's excellent book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, makes a compelling case for using a different critical perspective than the position of radicalism and opposition that defined much of postmodern art.

Posted by at December 14, 2005 1:00 PM

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What's going on here... For one week (Dec 12-16, 2005) we've asked a group of people with a keen interest in the dance world to come together online and debate. They'll be posting every day and we invite readers to join the conversation. Reader posts will be accessible by a link at the bottom of each blog entry, at the bottom of this side column, and we'll also excerpt reader comments in the main part of the blog. The intent of this discuassion, as in all AJ topic blogs ...
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Our topic Is it true, as Gia Kourlas declared in the New York Times in September, that "New York is no longer the capital of the contemporary dance world"? New York has, for so long, been at the center of dance, the idea is taken on faith in the US. Has the city lost its edge? And if not New York, where are the new capitals of dance? In Amsterdam or Bucharest? Berlin? Brussels, Paris or Vienna? Or has some of the energy that used to propel the New York scene spread elsewhere in America?